…FDNY Deputy Chief Charles Blaich last January conceded at a public fire-safety seminar that commanders had “lost control” of the rescue process at the World Trade Center. And in an interview with Salon, Blaich said the critical presentation has cost him a promotion.
…”The press is not doing enough to ask tough questions,” complains Sally Regenhard, whose son Christian, a rookie New York firefighter, died in the terror attack on the World Trade Center. “I’m very dissatisfied with the press — I expected so much more. Where’s ’20/20,’ or ’48 Hours,’ or ‘Frontline’ on this story? Even the New York Times, which is running all this stuff, seems to be trying not to step on toes. I wish they would step on toes. Toes are crying out to be stepped on. But there’s this aura around the Fire Department and everybody’s untouchable.”
…The findings are stunning: FDNY chiefs were working with defective radios and often could not communicate their orders to evacuate. The same radio system had failed eight years earlier, during the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Caught up in the confusion and urgency of the moment, hundreds of on- and off-duty firefighters streamed into the towers without checking in with superiors, making it virtually impossible to keep track of their locations.
And through it all, the Fire Department was not communicating with the Police Department — apparently, the fruit of an age-old turf battle. After the south tower had collapsed, NYPD officers in helicopters were relaying at 10:07 a.m. that the north tower looked like it too, was about to fall. Twenty-one minutes later it did, killing at least 120 firefighters, many of whom had no idea the south tower had fallen or that the north tower’s demise was inevitable.
“I can remember talking with a high-ranking fire officer from the West Coast, who’d been to New York, and his comment to me was, ‘The truth will probably never be known because [the rescue effort] was a such a fiasco,'” says Janet Wilmoth, editor of Fire Chief magazine.
…”Three-hundred and forty-three firefighters die” he fumes, “and nobody fucking says anything?” In several of his columns, Breslin has blamed Giuliani for not getting the Fire Department radios that worked and for not fixing the endemic communication problem between the police and fire departments.
He also blames a new generation of journalists for coverage that fails to provoke passion. “The big thing in the press is total absence of anger. They’re the best-educated people we’ve ever had but there’s nothing inside them to get mad. They’re sheep,” he said in an interview.
Read the rest in Salon. Where is the press? As the Salon story says… plenty of tears and few tough questions.
Kinda like the NEA’s lesson plans. Not one history lesson plan. Not even for High School. Why is that? Forget the fact that it’s a politically correct set of lesson plans. Just concentrate on one simple question – where is it’s history component? At least there are teachers that want to do their jobs and teach.